Comments

I don't know much about 4D, but MySQL is a light database. It's really not hard to find a more powerful one - postgreSQL comes to mind, among the open source stuff.

They're working on beefing it up somewhat - does it have ACID compliance yet? - but from the way 4D is pitched it looks a lot more powerful than MySQL is.

(For those wondering, ACID compliance has nothing to do with corrosiveness. It's a measure of the database's ability to make sure that a row isn't being read as it's being written to, for example. It's a list of design features that ensure that the database has the data you wrote to it, and serves you the data you ask it for, and there are no boundary cases that could result in clobbered or outdated data. For most of its existence, MySQL was not ACID compliant.)

MySQL is also free, and 4D isn't. Now, there is a lot of good free software out there, but when it comes down to it, you get what you pay for.

To find out which is the best... well, that all depends on your budget really. It also depends on what you need the database to do. OpenBase and FrontBase are a couple of other systems to look at. FrontBase in particular is a personal favorite of mine.

I'm currently working on my own little database project, and am using MySQL because the CMS I prefer (<a href="http://www.movabletype.org/&quot; target="_blank">Movable Type</a>) doesn't support PostgreSQL yet. (It's in progress, and I'll switch as soon as it's available.)